


even on this changeless day

by midheaven



Series: good together [2]
Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Established Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29119794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midheaven/pseuds/midheaven
Summary: Discrepancy between the Jungeun and Jiwoo of then and the Jungeun and Jiwoo of now sticking out to her, sore-thumb and highlighter-neon. The past may as well be an alternate reality. Looks at it and can’t help but think: something was lost, on the way here. Or gained in reverse.Five moments between Jiwoo and Jungeun.
Relationships: Kim Jiwoo | Chuu/Kim Jungeun | Kim Lip
Series: good together [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2136615
Comments: 24
Kudos: 73





	even on this changeless day

**Author's Note:**

> title from nogizaka46’s kimi no na wa kibou.

_또한 이 한마디가 아무리 모순되고 부당할지라도 새명처럼 절대적인 것임을 자부하고 또 고백합니다. 많은 말을 하지 않겠습니다. 다만 이것뿐입니다._

_I need to confess this even if this might be wrong, as I'm certain and proud of my love for you. I won't say much. This is all I want to say._

사랑방 손님과 어머니 (1961) dir. 신상옥

  
  
  
  


“Jungeun, come look at this.”

It’s three in the afternoon, time of day for Jungeun where her limbs move like the air is made of syrup. She forces herself, anyway; gets up from their dorm couch and pads over to Jiwoo, cross-legged at their dining table. Her wrist is twisted, phone screen in hand facing Jungeun. Jungeun’s contacts lay in their case so she has to get close, narrow her focus to see. 

Her and Jiwoo grin back at her. It’s an old photo—five years, at least, judging by the shapes of their faces and the widths of their smiles. The day comes back to her slowly—flickers, whispers—then all at once: a night where Jiwoo had to stay at their place for a couple hours because she had left her keys and had to wait for her mom to get home to unlock the door for her.

“Oh,” Jungeun exhales, punched-gut sigh. “Where’d you get this?”

Their extended proximity makes Jiwoo grab onto Jungeun’s hand and tug her until she’s in Jiwoo’s lap. Jiwoo hums, rests her head on Jungeun’s shoulder. “Mom,” she answers. “Was cleaning out her phone storage. I think your mom sent it over to her to show her I was with you.”

Jungeun remembers, her mother’s voice going: _Just so she doesn’t freak out! You know how us mothers are, come on, get together here._

The snapshot is foreign, discrepancy between the Jungeun and Jiwoo of then and the Jungeun and Jiwoo of now sticking out to her, sore-thumb and highlighter-neon. The past may as well be an alternate reality. Looks at it and can’t help but think: something was lost, on the way here. Or gained in reverse. 

“Everything was so different,” Jungeun says. “Simpler.”

Jiwoo places a kiss on Jungeun’s shoulder. “It was.”

Jungeun twists, grabs onto the back of Jiwoo’s chair for balance. Turns to face her. “Would you have ever thought?” she asks. “Back then?”

Years of Jiwoo always being within arms’ reach has done this to Jungeun: a careful memorisation of her every expression. Jungeun assigning meaning to each, like superscripts that call onto footnotes on a page. Her eyebrows upturning—confusion, but not a hurt one. A shift of her lower lip rightward—careful thought. But then her face illuminates, signature, world-famous smile, and that doesn’t need any decoding at all.

“You know me,” Jiwoo tells her. “I don’t think anything can ever be too good to be true.”

  
  
  
  
  


“You’re okay.”

They’re in a bingsu parlor a block away from SBS’ broadcast building. Jiwoo’s lips are tinted blue from how she’d dug into her shaved ice, fervorous and unrelenting. Jungeun’s mango one melts in front of her, steadily morphing into cloudy slush. 

“I know,” Jiwoo answers. “I know, but—it’s just. It’s not getting easier.” She looks up and it times with another tear falling down her face, catching in the light. Jungeun reaches out and wipes it with her thumb, the saltwater too warm. 

The first time Jiwoo opened up about it was in the spring. Breeze kind and cherries unfurling into life outside—in the vocal training room, Jiwoo’s voice breaks mid-song; Jungeun halts her piano playing. Then sees: Jiwoo’s mouth curled, shoulders bowing with a strident exhale. Remembers how fractured she felt, at the sight, emptied veins and mangled windpipe. Afterward, Jiwoo’s confession: _I can’t remember the last time I thought I’d done well._

“It will.” Jungeun says it more out of a need to believe it to be true. Places her hand forward and traces the pad of her index over the wiry surface of the back of Jiwoo’s hand. “Have to dig and dig, remember?”

Jiwoo nods. The ice crusher goes off and an electric hum drowns their space, swallowing the sigh Jiwoo lets out into inaudibility. “Tiring, though.”

Jungeun picks up that Jiwoo’s voice had regained some of its usual balance, less of the air that seems to strike through her words like a zipping arrow. It always happens like this, with Jiwoo—in brief, intense episodes, before she somehow self-soothes back into that constant whisper of a smile. 

“I know,” Jungeun responds, anyway. “But I also know you’ll find it, one day. The thing you like the most.”

Jiwoo doesn’t answer. Reaches out her spoon and takes a bite of Jungeun’s bingsu, teeth scraping against the steel, habit sticking even when all her lipstick is gone. She closes her eyes when it melts in her mouth, holds up the spoon by her face. When she opens them her unshed tears collect on the tips of her lashes like morning dew. Her eyes hone in straight towards Jungeun’s, the surface of the spoon reflecting the parlor’s amber light into her irises, making Jungeun think the next tear she sheds could be liquid gold. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Jiwoo-yah.”

“Mm?” Jiwoo stops, balancing herself on one leg before swinging back down to stand on both feet. Her lips pursed, eyes rounded. 

Jungeun stretches her hand in front of her, seeking. The restlessness she’d been feeling quieted down when Jiwoo takes it, counter-clockwise turn of a volume knob on an old radio. They walk to Jungeun’s bunk, Jungeun pulling Jiwoo down and putting a blanket over them. 

“Missed me?” Jiwoo asks, playfulness in her voice like cider. 

Jungeun nods. She pinches the collar of Jiwoo’s pajamas between her thumb and forefinger. “‘S my fault, though,” she says. “Haven’t been making much time for you.”

“We’re all busy.” Jiwoo brushes her ankle against Jungeun’s and it makes Jungeun shiver. “No need to blame yourself.”

“Still.” Jungeun shrugs. She looks at Jiwoo, lone object of her affection for years. Feels the familiar cavity in her chest gaping and gaping. Jiwoo’s mouth shifts into smugness—she knows, too; how desperately Jungeun wants this closeness. Jungeun moves her hand from Jiwoo’s collar to the soft wisps of her fringe, uncareful and dishevelling.

It’s Jiwoo who leans in to kiss her. Keeps it brief, but it does its job, spark wheel to the live gasoline of Jungeun’s blood. Jungeun combs her hand to the back of Jiwoo’s head and lurches forward, wanting those sweet exhales on her tongue, sugar cube-melt. There’s a singular, unexplainable category of longing, Jungeun thinks, when everything you want is always around you but never in your hands, chewed-out piece of your heart. 

The glittering in her chest is unchanged, after all this time, when Jiwoo responds with a forward tilt of her head, ever closer. When Jungeun sighs, the worry shackled to the back wall of her head asks: _Will the girls hear?_ It’s punched into indifference when Jiwoo crooks her leg and presses her knee into the meat of Jungeun’s thigh. 

They separate. Jungeun can’t see the crimson of Jiwoo’s cheeks but knows it’s there, places her fingertips against them, near reverence. Girl of her dreams somehow granted to her. Sunlight in her bones. Her trembling breaths. 

Jungeun shifts so she can kiss Jiwoo’s throat. “I’m kind of—” she hiccups against the soft skin and sinew there, wraps around Jiwoo’s voice, her holiest weapon. “I’m _stupid_ in love with you.”

When Jiwoo laughs, peaks of air, Jungeun feels the buzz on her lips. “That’s nice,” Jiwoo answers, scratching at the thin hairs at the base of Jungeun’s skull. “I am, too.”

  
  
  
  
  


“What’s going on?”

“Problems with sound.” Jungeun contorts to fiddle with the indicators on the mic pack tucked into the back pocket of her costume, finicky. “Minute or so delay.”

Jiwoo hums placidly, an unexpected response. Jungeun straightens and looks up to see: Jiwoo picking at the edge of her sleeve, her eyes hazed sleepy and almost swallowed dark, unnaturally so even for the low light of backstage. Jungeun knows what this is, too; exhales through a stream. Jiwoo takes a step backward and Jungeun follows, nerves compass needles that only ever draw her to Jiwoo. Jiwoo hooks her finger into one of Jungeun’s and pulls her close. 

“Careful,” Jungeun warns. 

Jiwoo nudges the collar of Jungeun’s jacket off her shoulder. Places a kiss on the newly exposed skin, hot and needy, and Jungeun has to bite back a sigh. Forgets, sometimes, of the effect she can have on Jiwoo, too; still finds the notion of Jiwoo feeling the same way faraway and flimsy as a summer cloud, impossible to have. But here Jiwoo is, exhales condensing at Jungeun’s pulse, the realest thing she’s known. 

“You are—” Jiwoo’s voice rattles. “ _Unbearable_ in this.” Her hands move to trace the stripes of Jungeun’s ribcage, pattern familiar and memorised, raising the hairs on Jungeun’s skin. “Stylist should get a raise.”

Jungeun steps forward, head fraying by the second, further from the stage lights. Jiwoo adjusts for her. This is how they have to love: between the shadow and the soul. Jungeun reaches out for something to hold, settles for the round bone that sticks out at the top of Jiwoo’s back, more pronounced now with how far she has to tilt her head down. Jiwoo grew past Jungeun’s height in their third year, and grew _again_ , Jungeun having to double take when she sees the crown of Jiwoo’s head nearing Sooyoung’s, nearing Jinsol’s, nearing Hyejoo’s. Proof of the passage of time, of the distance they’ve traversed: they have lasted so long. 

There it is: the flash prick of pain that tells her she’ll have muscle ache, tender spot on her shoulder for the days to come. Already knows how she’ll press her thumb against it, inattentively, when she’ll miss Jiwoo but can’t do anything about it. 

A yell: “They’ve sorted it out! Places!” from Hyunjin. Jiwoo pulls away and fixes Jungeun’s clothes, smooths down her jacket on the slope of Jungeun’s shoulders. Somehow, both of them are breathless. 

She leans in again but to kiss Jungeun’s forehead, instead; quicker, friendlier, lighter, hundred-and-eighty degree flip. Jiwoo’s smiling when she straightens back up, and Jungeun wipes the stray lipstick that’s bled past the corners of her mouth.

  
  
  
  
  


“Aren’t you cold yet?”

“Just a little,” Jiwoo answers. She beams at Jungeun. “Don’t you want to stay and have some more fun?”

Midmorning by the Han. Heaviest snowfall they’ve had in Seoul in years, flakes that look more like petals as they sit and melt on Jiwoo’s hair. Jungeun reaches and dusts them off—remembers that the last time she did this was the day after Jiwoo’s music video was released, Jiwoo’s hair burnt copper instead of the threaded ink it is now. Remembers thinking how graced she was, last syllable of the name her mother gave to her spilling into reality; she doesn’t have to navigate this world alone, a remnant of home to anchor her. Remembers thinking: how many people in the world get to be this lucky?

Jiwoo says, “Thanks,” after Jungeun’s finished. With the way her mask shifts and the corners of her eyes crinkle Jungeun knows Jiwoo’s done it again; taken her tongue-tip toward the outside of her front teeth, unshakeable habit. Here: another part of Jiwoo Jungeun was privy to the beginnings of. Pillow-soft memories of how Jiwoo started taking to the motion, of how Jungeun was there before it all.

Jungeun startles at the unannounced flash that darts underneath her skin: a want to peel hers and Jiwoo’s masks off and kiss her, riverside and swathed in cold light. 

This is the price for that grace: Jiwoo, all hers, but only ever in silence, in darkness, in locked rooms. Thinks, for a split second, to damn the consequences and just do it here. If a camera lens catches them—the conversations they’d start, the careers they’d end, the uncountable dominoes that would fall afterward. Jungeun feels frighteningly powerful and helpless at once. 

She curls her hand into a fist. Asks Jiwoo, “Do you ever regret? Choosing this?”

Jungeun doesn’t expound further. Doesn’t have to. Watches the slow clockwork of thought distill on Jiwoo’s face, clear to Jungeun even when only a third of it is visible. 

“Not really.” Jiwoo shrugs and shoves her gloved hands into the pockets of her jacket. “If I didn’t choose this, then what? Maybe I choose to not debut with the group, have only a fraction of what I have of you now. Maybe I choose to go to another company altogether, never answer Polaris’ call and have even less. Maybe I choose to go solo instead and have a happier stage but a sadder home. Maybe I choose to not sing at all and only see you through screens. Maybe I choose to not kiss you so we don’t jeopardise the group and never know what your love feels like. Maybe I choose to never talk to the pretty girl at the traffic light.”

Jiwoo’s voice is muffled through fabric but strikes clear in Jungeun’s ears, glass echoes. “I have singing and I have you. I have so much of what I want that I forget I gave up anything at all.”

Snow crunches under her feet when Jungeun shifts, unexplainable weightlessness in her knees as she looks at Jiwoo, somehow stripped of all her defences when she’s in five layers of clothing. Watches the sway of her hair, the rosy tips of her ears, the crystal focus of her eyes; takes all of her in as if they’re somehow back in an exam centre in Cheongju and this is Jungeun’s first time seeing her all over again. Maybe this is. A reintroduction. A rebirth. Still, unchanged: Jungeun’s heart whispering to her, knowing the girl in front of her is everything. Still, unchanged: Jungeun is in love.

“All my choices led me to here, Kim Jungeun.” Jiwoo crouches down to touch the snow-covered patch of earth she stands on. Then looks up at Jungeun, sun-drenched and unafraid. “And I’d make them all over again.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> referenced:  
> – [sunmi’s advice to jiwoo](https://youtu.be/P8X5l9kZf28)  
> – [stage outfit](https://twitter.com/loonatheworld/status/1347797812365258753)  
> – [ jungeun introducing herself as 金定恩](https://youtu.be/Zf2qbQeXQm8&t=70s) (the subs in the video are slightly erroneous). 金 jīn, ‘gold’; 定 dìng ‘to settle; steady’ 恩 én ‘ _grace._ ’  
> – [ jiwoo’s habit she started in high school](https://youtu.be/znxREMu2HgI)  
> – [ jiwoo talking about how polaris recruited her](https://twitter.com/nine_cube/status/1244601688125665281)  
> – can’t link to a single source bc they’ve talked about it multiple times, but jiwoo and jungeun met across the street from each other (jiwoo specifies traffic light) at the entrance exam venue to qualify for hanlim
> 
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/mediumcoelis), [curiouscat](http://curiouscat.me/pisceshorizon)


End file.
